Nature As Healer: Restoring Life As Community

Anna Marie Carter, the “Seed Lady” of Watts, shares heartful stories of community renewal that have grown from her work building free organic gardens for residents of south central Los Angeles. T. Allen Comp presents his extraordinary work with AMD&ART, a non-profit that has combined public art, environmental improvement and community engagement in treating abandoned mine drainage in Appalachia. 

Bios: 

Anna Carter, the "Seed Lady" of Watts, is an educator, researcher, advocate of organic gardening and heirloom seeds. She builds free organic gardens for residents of South Central Los Angeles who include the elderly, handicapped, disabled, AIDS and HIV victims, Breast Cancer survivors, and residents of drug, alcohol and mental health shelters. Currently interning with the Master Gardening Program at UCLA, she is also teaching children of the Jordan Downs Housing Project and surrounding neighborhoods "gardening, English, math and manners." 

T. Allan Comp Ph.D., a historian of technology and former Senior Historian with the National Park Service and a current leader in the Watershed Assistance Team of the Office of Surface Mining (OSM), is the Founder and Director of AMD&ART, a non-profit that combines public art, environmental improvement and community engagement in treating abandoned mine drainage (AMD), the most widespread environmental, economic and social problem of the Appalachian region. 

Bioneers Series III includes the following programs: 

• BN301 Part 1: The Duh Principle: Better Safe Than Sorry
• BN302 Part 2: Energy Security: the Growth of Soft Energy
• BN303 Part 3: Light At The Edge of The World: Reinventing The Poetry of Diversity
• BN304 Part 4: Greening Medicine: the Mainstreaming of Herbs
• BN305 Part 5: Soil and Soul: The Future of Farming
• BN306 Part 6: I Heard the Voice Of A Porkchop: The Theoretical Promise Versus The Actual Perils Of Genetically Modified Organisms
• BN307 Part 7: Less Is More : Toward A Zero Discharge Industry
• BN308 Part 8: Daughters of Thoreau: Not Too Well Behaved
• BN309 Part 9: Plants and People: Who's Cultivating Who?
• BN310 Part 10: Getting the Real Story: Bypassing Corporate Media
• BN311 Part 11: Nature As Healer: Restoring Life As Community
• BN312 Part 12: The Wonders of Gaia: Nature is Symbiotic
• BN313 Part 13: Nature and Spirit: It's All Connected 

The Bioneers series consists of three sets of 13 programs each:

Bioneers Series I The Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature
Bioneers Series II Improving Environment By Changing The World
Bioneers Series III

Inspired by the philosophies of the Deep Ecology movement, the Bioneers are heroic examples of people living as if nature mattered. Join us as we look deeply into the magic and mystery of the convergence between leading-edge science and ancient wisdom for a Declaration of Interdependence for the new millennium. Though these programs were produced in the 1990s the contents of this series are timelessly relevant. 

HOST: Michael Toms     INTERVIEW DATE: 2002            PROGRAM NUMBER: BN311